Today, we are talking about the Internet and e-commerce progress level of India, the seventh-largest by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. For the past several years telecommunication activities in India have been improved significantly. Numerous efforts carried out by the governmental and non-governmental organizations also helped the Internet infrastructure to become stronger.

The first company, that launched Internet services in India, was state-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) in August 1995. For the first four years, VSNL was the only Internet Services provider in India. But in November 1998, the VSNL’s monopoly was restricted by the Government that allowed Private Operators to provide customers with the Internet Services. The Terms and Conditions of the ISP’s License were unusually liberal: there was no License Fee, unlimited number of players was allowed, and ISPs could set their own prices, tariffs and even their own International Gateways.
 

The ISP market has been in a mess in spite of the much interest and attention that paid to the Internet development. As internetworldstats.com says there were around 180 operational ISPs in the country, after a period of market improvement. Though there are lots of Internet providers in the country, only 10% of the ISPs are equipped enough to cater for 90% of all the subscribers. BSNL and MTNL, the state-owned companies have grown rapidly to occupy first and second place in terms of the subscribers’ amount. The big role in the process of the Internet development in India is played by the Internet cafes or kiosks the number of which is constantly growing. There are more than 10,000 cybercafes across the country. Here is an interesting fact, the majority of those cafes (80%) are run by women, with no special skills or with a very little experience in technology use. That is a result of the Internet penetration in rural territories made by women. The internet access promotion supervised by women reveals a revolutionary effect on the 700 million people who live in Indian villages. This project was set up by one of India's leading technology institutes that has appointed women to manage the way of recovering from the digital divide.

Today Internet adoption continues to grow in India. The majority of Indian Web sites are being registered in the zone of Indian domains: .in or .co.in. The registration is cheap enough as a two year contract costs just $99. (http://www.rwgusa.com/cu.htm) The ".in" domain registrations exceeded the volume of 150,000 registered as for 2006, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). E-commerce and growing demand for .in domain registrations are also the factors influencing the number of the online users.

So, how many Indians got an access to the Internet? The statistics, presented by www.internetworldstats.com, reveals a significant 1,520% growth during the period of 2000-2008. In 2000 just 0.5 % of the population (or 5,500,000) appeared to be Internet users. In the year 2006 the number was 40,000,000 (or 3.6%). According to the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) in 2006 broadband usage in India was growing 20% per month! Hence in 2008 the number doubled and the amount of people got an Internet access reached 81,000,000 that means that 7.1% of Indians are the users of the Web. Totally the number of users in India makes up 12.5% of the whole Asia.

IT and Telecom Ministry broadband policy and other conducted initiatives encourage increased adoption. Thus a monthly broadband subscription costs as little as 199 rupees (that equals $4.50). IT Telecom Ministry’s initiative to make computers available for purchase under 10,000 rupees (or $226) is one more important factor. The organization continues to push development of language fonts as well in order to remove language and localization of content issues as an addition to working with hardware manufacturers to remove the financial barrier for households in India.

So, e-commerce in India – what does it look like today? Indian eCommerce space percentage is getting higher as more and more online retailers enter the market. Although this level of entry in the e-commerce market is good from a long term perspective, the challenge is that most entrepreneurs don’t have the resources or capital to wait for years before they can get profits. 

One of the best examples of Indian e-commerce providers is Himalayan IT solutions – e-commerce Development Company that is based in Delhi and has a long experience in e-commerce shopping developing and design. The company offers e-solutions to the clients referring to B2B and B2C businesses that include all kinds of online transactions. 

One more example is Power Reviews, a provider of technologies for online retailers in US to capture and display customer/product reviews on the site. It claims to go one step ahead of the traditional customer reviews, and offers unique capabilities to aggregate the ratings across multiple product dimensions. Power Reviews can be fully integrated into a website within a few days. Moreover the entire offering is available for no cost to online retailers. Power Reviews also supports another online property, Buzzillions.com. The only thing they ask online retailers in return for their sophisticated Reviews technology is that the reviews collected on the retailer’s web site are syndicated and aggregated on the Buzzillions website.

Well, there is always a question: how to set online business? As well as in the number of the developed and industrial countries, it’s not a big deal to do it in India either. One of such examples is wilsonweb.com which offers several ways of launching Internet business in India. First approach it offers is the best for large companies but can become expensive for small businesses. It assumes applying to PaySeal as the payment gateway for ICICi Bank; or to Citibank India and HDFC Bank that also provide payment gateway and merchant account. The second approach site offers is to use third parties to take credit cards for sales. An Indian company CCAvenue provides direct debiting for Indian customers with accounts at HDFC, Citibank, ICICI, IDBI, UTI, Global Trust Bank, Centurion Bank and the Federal Bank Ltd. Usual cost is INR 7,500/-set-up fee, INR 1,200/-annual fee, and 7% to get credit cards, 4% for net banking transfers. As for Trancecute, it includes fraud detection and risk mitigation, charging INR 30,000/-set-up fee and 5% per transaction. And the third approach the site reveals is to set up a PayPal account (that is available for Indian residents) and use PayPal’s merchant tools to obtain credit cards and sell online. But the drawback is that it’s impossible to withdraw directly PayPal funds to a bank of India, though there is an opportunity to request a check. However it’s possible to transfer US dollars in a PayPal account to Remit2India (a Times of India service) as they convert it into Indian Rupees and deliver it to the recipient designated. The PayPal recipient fee is 2.95% plus 3% to 5% fees for Remit2India. 

Here is the list of the most popular e-commerce solutions in India (referring to www.designfirms.org): 
•    SourceEdge Software India, end to end service provider for all business needs related to Web media from Website, Web application, Web portals, B2C, B2B and custom related web solution for specific business needs.
•    FSL Projects Limited, Software Development Company located in India. Since its inception in 1999, FSL has steadily grown to become a reputed provider of offshore software development services to the clients.
•    Igloo360, a professional web design and 3d animation company based in Mumbai, specializing in web and technology, based on innovation as ideas that create results.
•    Crony Infotech, a leading web development and consulting company that helps small and medium sized organizations to achieve their objectives and goals by providing comprehensive and web based tech solutions.
•    Adept Data Services, located in New Delhi, offers offshore data entry, scanning, internet web services, image editing, data mining outsourcing and BPO services.
•    LinuxFlavour, is a OneStopSolution for all the Linux Distributions.
•    SourceEdge, Outsource Software Development Company.
•    Art n Design Inc, is the team of expert freelancers that know the value of time and professionalism and are the experts in web designing, development and print media designs.
•    Creative Web Solutions, a leading web development company in India providing expert Web Developers,software develpers,grapic website designs,professional web designers.
•    babynology.com, popular baby names for boys and girls.
•    Online Retail Business, a smart e-Commerce solution that will give the information about the e-Commerce and e-Marketing Strategies.

Let’s turn to some figures again. According to IAMAI, a trade association that presents the online content and advertising, e-commerce and mobile content and advertising industry, Indian citizens use Internet for a number of activities including e-mail and IM - 98%, job search – 51%, e-banking – 32%, bill payment -18%, stock trading – 15%, and matrimonial search – 15% (internetworldstats.com says). 

So, as we could see India doesn’t intend to stay behind other countries concerning all the spheres of technological progress and processes of Internet and e-commerce development either. Actually Indian Government plays a very important role in the progress, favoring the development by a lot of initiatives such as providing cheap Internet access, not expensive PC’s for citizens and so on. Well, we could have a belief that just in several years India could reach the level of the most developed countries referring to the Internet infrastructure.